Garbage Provides Look at Life of Slaves : Archeology: China shards and animal bones suggest that those who worked for the first President lived and ate better than previously assumed.

Archeologists at George Washington’s home, searching through a 200-year-old garbage pit, have found a mother lode of information about how the nation’s first President treated his slaves.

A 36-foot cellar at Mt. Vernon yielded household items once used by 70 slaves he owned. The archeologists unearthed utensils, belt buckles, shards of fine china and crude earthenware, as well as more than 20,000 animal bones in two months of digging this winter.

The evidence suggests the slaves may have lived and ate better than previously assumed, chief archeologist Dennis Pogue said.

“It indicates perhaps slavery, at least at Mt. Vernon, was a little less onerous,” Pogue said. “That is not to say slavery was not a bad situation.”

The dig raises sensitive historical questions about how Washington treated his more than 300 slaves and his views on the abolitionist movement gathering strength in the latter part of the 18th Century, Pogue and experts on slave life said.

Few slaves could read or write in the 18th Century, Smithsonian Institution slave expert Theresa Singleton said.

“In the 19th Century and especially in the antebellum period we have records, testimony from slaves themselves that doesn’t exist earlier . . . and that is why the archeology is so important.”

Some of the items found at Mt. Vernon indicate that the objects were once used in Washington’s home. The high quality of many of the table items suggests that they were hand-me-downs, Pogue said.

In one case, diggers found bits of a white china that records show Washington bought for his own use in the 1750s. There are bones from a variety of fish and domestic and wild animals, indicating that slaves both fished and hunted.

“That contradicts the stereotypical view of slaves. This indicates their diet was relatively healthy within the constraints of the 18th Century,” Pogue said. “They must have had free time to fish and perhaps access to guns to hunt.”

Historians had long assumed that slaves ate mostly rations from the plantation owner and vegetables they grew.

“The importance of fish in the slave diet is a new discovery. It hasn’t been seen archeologically anywhere in the region before,” said Joanne Bowen Gaynor, an expert on plant and animal remains at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Va.

But Singleton said the evidence can be viewed another way: “A lot of their food was food they got themselves, hence Washington didn’t have to pay for it.

“Archeological findings can be highly politicized. Obviously we are not trying to be apologists for slavery. We are not apologists for George Washington, either. He was a slave owner and that’s that,” Pogue said.

Washington ordered his slaves freed after his death in 1799.

“We are dealing with a man who was largely responsible for securing American independence,” historian Jean Lee said. “Independence was founded on the notion that at least men were created equal and sovereignty rested with the people. These were tremendously powerful ideas in the 18th Century, radical ideas . . . and it raised the question that if all men were created equal, why did we have slaves?

“It made people question slavery in a way they never had, that it was not just someone’s lot in life to be a slave. George Washington was highly sensitive to this, and it may have had some effect on slavery at Mt. Vernon,” said Lee, director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg.

“There is a recognition that history is not just looking at the past of white Americans. America is a lot more than that,” Pogue said.